10June2008
Posted by admin under: Uncategorized.
Few months ago, after sending a renewal reminders, I got a reply from a customer that he already renewed his domain with “Domain Registry of America”, he said that a sales agent called him and asked him to renew his domain as soon as possible and the customer paid to them by credit card, in this time I explained to the customer that 2mhost is not “Domain Registry of America” and the domain is still registered by us and he had to pay us to renew the domain! I did not follow this case because it looked like a scam attempt by someone.
Today same story happen again, same scenario, but this time the victim paid with check so there is no doubt that “Domain Registry of America” themselves is scam company and contacted our customer to renew his domain while they do not have any access to this domain and they can’t renew the domain for him.
I hope I can get more details from our customer to publish it here, until then, be ware, we are not or affiliated with ”Domain Registry of America”, they can’t renew your domain name.
Update
our customer sent us the letter she received from DROA, its a hardcopy sent by regular mail
Although everything written in that letter is correct, but its hide important parts too need to be explained before they ask for money.
- They advice the user that her domain needs renewal every year and this is correct.
- They told her that she do not have to renew with the current registrar in sneaky way
- They DIDN’t tell her that she need what so called EPP code from current registrar to complete the transfer, and the other steps required to complete the domain transfer process.
anyways, legally I see nothing on the letter, but its not ethical way to gain customers.
5June2008
Posted by admin under: Uncategorized.
Finally,google penalty has been removed and after 90 days of pain we are up again in google search results!
Google penalty?
I have searched and didn’t find any official source in google that admits what so called ‘google penalty’, but it does exist ,there is a cold war between Google and “some” webmasters, google puts rules to rank the websites in better way , the webmasters are trying to find out those rules to cheat google to increase their websites ranking , when google enhances his rules the webmasters enhance their methods too and so on, when Google find what they are doing he puts new rules to punish who are trying to manipulate the search results and depending on what they did google may remove those websites from his index or give them a penalty, in our case we got just a penalty .
How the penalty looks like?
In our case, if you were searching for “2mhost” instead of getting 2mhost.com as the first result you will find us in the sixth page!!, google simply added around 50 websites above our actual rank, 2mhost.com was ranked as the third website in “cheap web hosting” and during the penalty we became in the 6th page, ..etc ,as a result, we lost all the traffic from google and ofcourse lost a lot of business.
Check the graphs below from alexa.com
I’d say that we have dropped more in this 90 days, putting some ads here and there helped us to get some traffic, so the above graphs could have been worse without those ads.
Did 2mhost deserve a penalty?
Its really hard to tell, I believe we played it nice with our SEO methods, Also I think google allows some margins around his guidelines, the only thing that I feel sorry about is buying a bulk of links from a reseller with us, his offer was good , he has 100s of article websites,so the offer was writting some articles about web hosting and link it to us, spread it over 100s of websites then google will index this articles and rank us higher .. links are permanent, “pay once and get links forever” .. looks like a bargain to anyone interested in building links .. but it was easy for google to find that, we got 100s of links at once, all from similar, useless, long articles in websites that no one reads .. so google punished us, a 90 days of 50-lower-rank-penalty.
What we did to remove the penalty?
Well, we did 2 main things:
1. removed all paid links to us.
2. submitted google reconsideration form, which is the only way to ask google for forgiveness, you can find many articles that will tell you the etiquette to talk to google! OK, I followed every advice ..
personally, I think that adding google penalty and removing it is 100% automated process, I think no one at google reviewed 2mhost.com before giving the penalty or read my request(s) to remove it.
anyways, .. its over now and we are happy for that, I have learned a lot of things about SEO and I hope to write about them soon.
3June2008
Posted by admin under: announcements.
And welcome roundcube, finally the appealing web2.0 webmail client is now available for all clients
29May2008
Posted by admin under: Guides.
While I was preparing a small guide to Magento installation for the end users, I faced a silly issue, In the guide, I’m asking the user to download 40MB of magento content to his/her computer then upload it using FTP or cPanel file manager .. silly isn’t it?
With shell root access, I’m using WGET command to get large files directly to the server, downloading 40MB takes less than 4 seconds!
In cPanel filemanager, you can extract zipped files, but you can’t download/get the file direct from the web, you need to upload it from your computer.
So to solve this issue, I have made the following PHP script, this script will allow you to get any large compressed file direct to your hosting account in an average speed of 10MB/second.
How to use it:
- Copy/Paste the code below to your text editor (notepad is enough)
- Modify the $fileToDownload value and put the url to the file you want to download
for example:
$fileToDownload=’http://www.2mhost.com/web-hosting-images/2mhost.gif’;
- Save the file and name it whatever you want with extension .php ; For example : 2mwget.php
- Upload the file to any folder within your /public_html folder.
- Run the script from the browser and you are done, if file is big, it could take some time
The code:
<?
/* --------------------------------------------
WGETinPHP by <a href="http://www.2mhost.com">www.2mhost.com</a>
--------------------------------------------- */
// specify the file you want to download below, start with http://
$fileToDownload='http://www.2mhost.com/web-hosting-images/2mhost.gif';
// specify where you want to put it, default is '.', to put the file
// in same folder as the script.
$putFileIn='.';
// No need to edit any thing below
$toDownload = file_get_contents($fileToDownload);
if (!$toDownload) {
die('<br>ERROR: could not get the file, may be the file is not there.');
}
if (!file_put_contents($putFileIn.'/'.basename($fileToDownload),$toDownload)) {
die('<br>ERROR: Got the file, but could not write it');
} else {
echo '<br>DONE: Download completed to '.$putFileIn.'/'.basename($fileToDownload);
}
?>
28May2008
Posted by admin under: Guides; announcements.
Today we have completed the Zend Framework installation (and update) in all servers, not only the PHP 5 hosting servers, so right now you can include any Zend framework standard library direct to your application without having it in your account, in this way you can guarantee regular update of ZF core files while your application files are safe in your account.
For who wants to try ZF, you can start using it by downloading this file Zend framework ‘hello world’ application, after that simply upload it to any folder in your hosting account then extract it (The File Manager included in the cPanel can extract zip files) and run it from the browser.
For example, I uploaded the file to /public_html of this blog hosting account, check the following link: http://www.2mhostblog.com/zendf/html/
We installed Zend FW according to the public demand, however, I’m using and prefer code igniter framework, I recommend Codeigniter for the same reasons listed in codeigniter website:
- small footprint.
- requires nearly zero configuration.
- does not require you to adhere to restrictive coding rules
- and I add, well documented and EASY to learn.
